


Miles v Vandalism (2019)

by tothemovies (jayjem_jam)



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Gen, OC Mai Alvarez, give him more friends, if you see gankemiles shhh, miles playing a game of 'let's do it babey i know the law'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:08:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23982091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayjem_jam/pseuds/tothemovies
Summary: The lesson is this: If you do wander down the path of vandalism, do clean up after yourself. Or get someone else to clean up after you as a recompensation for the crime against society that they had previously committed. Don’t get caught while you yourself are committing crime yourself, you hypocrite - and remember -The Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderboy Has His Eyes On You and The Police Records. Don’t do crimes. And if you do, don’t get caught.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	Miles v Vandalism (2019)

**Author's Note:**

> yes it is set like a court case yes i am a law student and yes, i did write more than one (1) spiderverse fic

So maybe he has a little bit of a reputation. An infamous kind, the one where he turns his head and the whispering starts like a match lit and dropped onto spilled gasoline across the perfectly polished floor. 

Maybe all those vandalism art has consistent art styles. Maybe Miles’ eye-popping graphics have been circulating the school on clubs’ flyers and banners for fundraisers and cute headers for the office ladies to look at and relax when their ancient desktops load to their Boring Administrative Page for all the paper crunching to begin another day of feasting.

It’s all speculation. Miles is a good boy. He is the son of a police officer, a captain of the 78th precinct of the city of Brooklyn. He can’t think of performing unlawful stunts like defacing public walls and the sides of people’s houses without his dad bringing upon his person the Eye of Lawful Disappointment.

Also Policeman Father can and will lecture him and think of a million and one ways to restrict his freedom now that it’s just him and Ganke. It’s not that Ganke doesn’t matter. He can daresay that every other thing sucks besides Ganke, and Brooklyn is just a terrible terrible place except for the four people that he would die for.

Which doesn’t really resolve all the jitter bugs from the life that he led, all the impulses to go out patrolling Brooklyn at night.

Everyone, all the people that could possibly understand these Radioactive Magic Spider Bug Bite Debacle, have all:

\- Left

\- Are gone

\- Are no longer with us

\- Departed this mortal and dimensional plane

Everybody else who knows of Spiderboy doesn’t know who he is and what he stands for and what he does. It’s all horrible horrible desolation and him screaming inside his head with his newly installed Inner Going Through Puberty Narrator, which is the least helpful Radioactive Spider Power anyone can develop, ever, and so now he’s here.

Gods it’s all so so boring. He can’t sit still, can’t sleep. He spares a glance to his Ganke. Fast asleep, right on time, right on schedule.

He slips on his hood, hauls his legs over the window ledge, and swings out into the Brooklyn night. 

Thing is, Miles doesn’t just leave his art, though fantastic and should, by all rights and law of freedom of artistic expression, be framed in the  _ Louvre de la art _ , but putting that aside, he doesn’t leave all the graffiti lying around. Father grew up cultivating and encouraging his hobbies. On one of those nightly patrols, one thing to another will lead him to one of the concrete canvases, courtesy of Miles’ latest artistic endeavours and he’ll knock all the hinges off his dorm room firing questions at why he is defacing public property.

Then he’ll have to clean it. While being lectured and performing criminal community correction work in an ugly yellow duck onesie.

He would be making a lot of points about his capabilities as an artist specialising in graffiti art, but at the cost of Jefferson glaring down at his neck and banning him for life from artist-ing?

He would much rather study physics and gain a doctorate in it rather than risk his only other form of stress relief.

No, he is on patrol. He ought to be doing Patrol Work and Enacting Justice in the name of the Long Gone Radioactive Spider, not plotting out ways to get himself arrested by his own father. The motions are familiar - keep an eye out for creeps in the dark, go invisible, tap 'em on the shoulder, zip zap, slappy slap, tape 'em up and check on the victim.

She's doing okay, though she's more spooked that the local friendly Spiderboy just came out from the depths of shadow to apprehend a sexual harasser rather than the fact that she was going to become another statistic on the unreported sexual harassment list at the end of the annual quarter.

Miles tries Very Hard in tossing the guy with less force than the rage inside of him screamed for. No, he is a patrol guard, local friendly superhero. Mildly infringing upon the ‘vigilante’ label that his dad oh so dearly reminds him of every other weekend that he comes back home.  _ Technically _ , he shouldn't be doing all of this, but the number of crimes is impossibly disproportionate to the number of justice enforcers who can apprehend them, so he is reducing the workload and boosting his brand of Trustworthiness in the eyes of Brooklyn. Uncle Aaron would be very proud of him. Father would be too, after his rant on how 'vigilante justice doesn't bring about restorative justice, because you're just fighting crime with crime, and furthering the perpetuation of violence on the street' is finished and Miles can advocate for his own brand of Fresh Justice™. 

Also, Miles is fifteen. His attention span doesn't cater to that speech. His brain is also simple. Hang bad guys up for police officers to deal with him, resolve unexplained nervous tics inside teenage body, go back to school dorm and crash in bed, unaware of the world for a couple of hours. That’s the plan for every other day, accounting for imminent life threatening situations like Sudden World Wars or Oh No My Assignments Are Due Noo. 

Waving the girl away, he tapes the harasser very tightly and uncomfortably against the light pole, incongruously hanging on Fifth Avenue. Just dangling there, being an insult to the name of men and just being a gross human in general.

He swings back to his dorm, the window slightly closed, barring the noise pollution from waking his entire dorm block. As he climbs in, tugging his mask away, he finds his set of pyjamas, folded, lying conspicuously on the edge of his bunk bed, with no note.

Really. He shares this room with Ganke. Who else would do such a nice thing for him, if not sweet and caring Ganke Lee? 

He peels himself away from his suit, like a lobster changing its shell for the year, except this lobster does it every night and - maybe that's more of a snake thing, but again, do snakes change their skin that often? Nightly skin shedding - is that a reptile activity? Is he just making animal facts up to fit his similes? Is he Mother Nature enough, David Attenborough enough to pull that off? 

He slips into his comforter, whispering a _ Thank you _ and  _ Ganke you don't suck all that much _ , in which both are huge for him to admit out loud. Ganke is a very special bean that had earned the highest calibre of respect that Miles dishes out, and he ought to feel very honoured and respected. There is a pedestal in which Miles had upheld him, Lion King style, unbeknownst to his roommate and friend.

Ganke snores on. Miles will tell him in the morning. 

Everything is as it always has. He's okay with that.

His reputation persists. He knows that people know he is involved with the vandalism by the science block somehow, though right now he can't specifically attest to how a human person can get to the ceiling and paint an elaborate spider symbol for the entire school to see. 

He's tall, but he's not that tall. He can technically stick to the wall and scale it, but he is tragically only capable of adhering to a horizontal surface with both hands and both feet. Until the day that he attains more limbs, he can't be held responsible for the onslaught of graffiti works blooming across the school.

To be fair, this copycat artist is great at imitating Miles' style. If they do run across each other outside the course of him pursuing this miscreant who is piling blame onto his shoulder, he might even rub shoulders and tell this mystery artist 'Great work', after booting him into the dark depths of Infinite Detention.

Ganke worries for him, despite being in exactly one class with Miles. He knows what's up with Miles, what he's worrying about, his problems and woes outside of the typical Teenage Angsty Moving Ideas. Miles on the other hand thinks his roommate is just a psychic at this point and actively tries to dodge all conversations that revolve around his feelings and how he is coping.

It's fine. He's Fine. He's going to cope and manage. Don't touch him.

"I think," Ms Calleros, the Hawk Eyed Physics Overlord, because there's no human way that someone can know something from the way he breathes in the class, because nothing else human can explain him being here. "You're going through a tough time."

Miles' first priority wasn't to lash out and be defensive over his Internal Issues. His first priority is to stare and ask, quizzically -

"Uh, how did you know that," he squints harder, tacking on a respectful 'ma'am' at the end of his supposed question.

"You were actually paying attention in class," she points the end of a pen at him. "And no pen twirling or tapping."

"Miss, that's actually creepy how you just  _ know  _ that about me. Are you keeping tabs on me or..."

Miss Calleros, because she doesn’t have time for his nonsense and teenagery issues, waves aside his tentative accusation of her potential monitoring of him, Poster Boy for Problem Child at Brooklyn Vision. 

"Don't tell that to me, tell that to your classmates. They thought something broke you enough that you're not being annoying to everyone around you, and told that to me. I only noticed something about you when you hand in your assignments, which," she gestures at the stack of paper. "No doodles. No smart critiques of my materials or delivery. Which things are happening, Miles, that removes you away from the academic setting?"

He blurts out the first thing that comes inside his head. 

"I just think our system of justice needs a bit more refinement and specific tailoring for offenders so that there is enough deterrence for them not to be a recidivism statistic."

She blinks. And then closes her eyes behind her glasses.

She mutters, mostly to herself, but he can hear her. "I'm paid too little to be providing attention to this." She looks up, slapping a hand to her stack of assignments and rising, throwing her cardigan over a shoulder. Marching out of the room, she leaves the door open, eyes wide and expectant at him, so that he can totter after her, books falling sideways and clutched weirdly with his elbows, as they wind around the throng of rushing students to somewhere.

"Uh, ma'am, where are we goin-"

"I'm finding a place where we can sit down and talk, Mr Morales. Since you're busy looking too down these days, I've taken it within myself to resolve the problems," she pushes a door open, after like fifty flights of stairs and a lot of doors. "Get in, come on. Or I'm closing it."

He gets in.

There is a long bench, and Miss Calleros neatens up her stack of papers and arranges them all in her manila folder, while he stands about and wonders if this is going to be a therapy session or an interrogation session and braces for both. She is correct in stating that he has underlying issues that requires him addressing those issues, but - neither of them are professional at counselling, and he has a feeling that it might blow up on his face in the situation where it does go south.

“Take a seat, Mr Morales,” she pats the bench next to her. “Don’t give me that face. We’re both trying our best here.”

“It feels less trying and more threatening, just from where I’m standing,” he gestures vaguely, “and I appreciate what you’re doing, but you don’t need to force it upon yourself, Miss Calleros.”

“If I don’t give you at least some form of guidance, as an adult whose legal responsibility includes caring for your wellbeing, I would be failing my job. And be standing in for disciplinary actions for not fulfilling my legal responsibility. I don’t need that or the paperwork on top of these stacks. So that’s why, right now, your wellbeing is compromised, and I have to pretend to care,” she pats the space next to her even more, eyes hard. “Sit, Miles. If I’m playing, we’re both suffering. Let’s talk about your feelings now.” 

He sits, mildly confused and vaguely in fear that she might spontaneously combust if they both don’t do this One Thing and her career is compromised. 

“I heard the bit about rehabilitative justice as an alteration to the current state of the legal system we have,” she says, right away, and stumps him into silence. “Don’t look at me weird. I listen when there are smart and sensible things spoken to me.”

He blinks. “Thank - Thank you?”

“So what are you going to do about this problem?” 

Miles feels like she knows something he’s not happy to let her be in the knowing about, but she is also taller than him by a head and a figure of authority. She probably can best him hand-to-hand combat. It’s a frightful image and he’s not specifically open to being a casualty statistic in Miss Calleros’ illustrious amateur boxing career. 

“I, well, I plan to mostly on sitting here and writing angry rant essays to the Mayor, so uh, not as much as I would like to be doing, but hey, I’m only fifteen and a kid, what can I do,” he drums his fingers on the scratchy material of his grey slacks, adding a nervous peal of laughter that he hopes is enough to throw her off.

The look she slants him is heavy enough to take down an elephant, but she doesn’t press for anymore, pulling out a sheet of paper.

“Miss, uh, what -?”

“Homework,” she waves him aside, flicking it in front of his nose. “Give it a read. Then stay back after English on Friday to talk to me about it.”

His mouth moves into a smirk involuntarily, an effect of being raised in a household that allows him to get away with too many social mishaps. “Are you going to set me a pop quiz too, every time we have Pretend Counselling Talk?” 

She shrugs. “Your choice, kiddo. But read it, and don’t use the south wing anymore if you do sneak out. We can hear you.”

Miles is ready to scream. Seriously. He’s going to scream and then launch himself off the roof of this building. 

“Ma’am,” he wrings his fingers full of scratches and bandages from scrabbling at the sides of buildings to prevent from adding himself from the waiting list of the newest broadcast of Stupid Deaths. “Even if I do sneak out -”

She springs a look of dramatically faked surprise at him. “Oh  _ really,  _ I  _ genuinely  _ have no idea! How  _ presumptuous  _ of the entire teaching staff to  _ assume  _ that righteous and advocative Miles Morales  _ would ever dare  _ sneak out at night!” 

He’s a little more than afraid of her now. Her name is probably something scarily normal to compensate for the scalding confrontational tone her voice always projects. 

“I don’t use the south wing,” he waves his palms in front of her. “I’m not an idiot. I don’t go near the teachers’ lounge for obvious reasons.”

He has a distinct moment where he realises too late.  _ Uh oh,  _ his brain mutters in abject despair, as Miss Calleros hums in very loud acknowledgement of her clear victory. 

“Whoever is using it, they sure are good enough to make all the suspicions point at you,” she rises, looking down at him. “Maybe your first project shouldn’t be the big world of crime, but it should be looking more at this itsy little society that you live in and helping to better it. That way, branching out is just a logical progression on that chain of events.”

She makes sense, she does, but Miles’ brain is wired to work on the Big Projects first - zooming out before he can zoom in again. It’s entirely a curse - and anyone who call him on it or attempt to course-correct his monkey brain undoubtedly return with disappointment, because Miles does things backwards  _ and  _ takes very badly to feedback, no matter how well-intentioned they are bundled up to look. 

Spite had always been the majority of ingredients that boil his concoction of Functioning in Society on a regular basis. Motivation, with a side of pep talking, also helps too, but as his monkey brain and backward thinking predetermine most of the routes he’s swinging webs down, spite provides the steam for the long journey.

He thanks Miss Calleros with a mix of confused fear and reluctant gratitude, because it sounded roundabout, what she told him, but there was care in the execution and she meant well. 

“Thanks, Miss Calleros.”

“Hm,” she rolls her eyes. “Remember, Miles, No Expectations. Hold that close to heart.” 

She told him once that his book title will not even come close to ‘Great Expectations’, because, as verbatim to her words - ‘You’re not a poor white boy in Victorian England who might chance upon rich society to escape racial, societal and economic oppression’. However, she still pins the photo he sends in to her, ‘No expectations’ emblazoned, bold and proud, the memory of him and his uncle spraying the word, staking a space for themselves without the expectations of the world weighing in on their choices. 

Aaron lives on in this conversation they had. He nods and lets his shoulders drop, physically forcing the worry to relax from his frame. Miles is a fifteen-year-old black, Puerto Rican vigilante with arachnid powers. There’s been no other like him. He’s the protagonist of his own world. It’s going to follow in the lines he sketched out.

Ganke and him try to squeeze through the line at the canteen to grab a hold of the cheap popsicle sticks before they’re sold out clean by grubby teenage hands. They’re scrambling over people and elbowing each other, yelling and pulling at blazers and ties. 

Miles yells at Ganke’s ear. “I got here first! Line up properly!”

“You tripped me and took the spot!” Ganke hotly counters, as they bicker until the freezer, and then they  _ fight  _ to pay for each other.

The lunch lady, lovely and sweet Geraldine, too desensitised to teenagers and their pointless bickering, who also memorised their popsicle orders months ago, pulls the beloved popsicles out and somehow wrangles the exact change from both of their clenched fists, all in two arm swipes.

“Geraldine,” he gasps, only a tad dramatic. “How did you even make that happen?”

“You’re holding up the line, Miles,” she swats him away. “No, Ganke, don’t glare.”

Miles is appropriately herded away - “No fighting, you two” - she reprimands fondly, as they are shuffled away from the line and to a bench, wielding their steaming icy poles like lightsabers. 

Peeling off the plastic packaging and mutually expressing speechless disdain at themselves for this environmentally damaging decision, they drop the packaging by the bin, huddling close and biting off each other’s flavoured ice.

“You know what this tastes like?” Ganke points the bitten off icy pole at his nose as he wrinkles his nostril and takes another bite off his friend’s snack.

Miles makes a sound that is akin to  _ I am listening but I don’t process what you are saying but saying it out loud will get me smacked so go on,  _ to which Ganke plows on regardless of whether he had protested or not.

“Two dollars. It tastes like two dollars.”

He stops chewing on his flavoured ice and rises, a smidge taller than Ganke, and openly frowns at his friend, his roommate, the other half of their synched brain cell, full of criticism and disappointment.

Miles turns on his heels to leave, Ganke laughing at his back.

“Come back to me, Miles!” 

“I need to leave the premise, like, now.”

“Also,” Ganke tugs on his elbow, jerking a chin up. “What’s with that?”

There is another graffiti, on the pristine white ceiling, and just. Why. They spend more time on wondering how it got there, people walking around them but also looking at where they’re looking up, pulling out phones and Snapchatting  _ another graffiti on the school’s walls again smh,  _ than actually going anywhere, the icy pole almost melting in their grip.

“Wow that is a tall, tall person,” Ganke marvels.

“Or they’ve got a really tall, tall ladder,” Miles chips in, trying to bite away at the last bits of his sinking icy pole, capsizing its way to the floor.

“Or -” he begins again, but is interrupted with a girl shoving her shoulder between them, sneering equally as they inspect the handiwork of this vandalism artist. 

Ganke falls into affronted silence, and is about to speak out on both of their behalf, before Miles raises an arm, shaking his head.

They watch the girl skulk into her classroom, realising too late that they are  _ late,  _ and they will not hear the end of it if they arrive late to pre-calc  _ again  _ this week. Mrs Ooi will announce their entrance as one would for foreign dignitaries entering through special airport gates, and it will be humiliating enough that people will laugh at him even more in the corridor.

_ so whats the deal with the kid -  _ Ganke slides his notebook over, the corner scribbled with the tiny text, as he slants an eye over to read it.

_ idk she looks like she could put both of us in the ground, so i didnt wanna risk it -  _ He scribbles back a reply, snapping back to attention to the problem on the board. Antiderivative. Ew.

_ still cannot believe the spiderman that jumped in front of a gun fight last week is the same one i just saw then. _

_ dude, pick yo battle, that’s how it goes. and that wasn’t a battle i could have won. shut it _

_ ayyyy just thought you cared a lot more about natural justice bc the system is broken and trampled through, but what does a little creachure from robotics know _

Miles scribbles out a shocked emoji onto the quickly filling page of sniping notes, from one brat to another, done lovingly but also scaldingly, without holding much back.

Thinking back to the real reason why he stopped Ganke from entering a verbal smackdown with a girl, the bottles of spray cans he can hear jostling in her bag, the flash of a mechanical grappling arm from underneath the flap of her open blazer.

He thinks - he has many suspicions now and they are all terrible, terrible things to indulge in - he thinks she is the one responsible for the alarming rise in rates of school property vandalism, probably using the tech that Olivia ‘Liv’ Octavius uses. Spider arms, imitation skills. He knows for sure that in a fight, she can put him in the ground easily, like Gwen and Peni could have easily accomplished, suits or not.

_ leave me aloneeee -  _ he jots to Ganke, holding a finger to his lips, and turns back to the lesson. Ganke can learn through osmosis - he can’t. He’ll have to force himself to care about this because the more pressing issues - he has no proof of the number one suspect being someone else that isn’t him and he still hasn’t put down the recidivism rates of Brooklyn by a significant amount.

Ms Calleros comes unbidden to mind.  _ Fix **your** world first, then **the** world.  _

He’s going to try just that. 

Each version of Spiderman had been different. Each version brings something that is distinctly theirs to the Spiderman collection plate of varied flavours that in the end, each Spiderman is its own version of the thing.

Gwen plays in a band. Peni is an engineer. Peter B. does...whatever he does. Noir comes from a literal black and white world and punches Nazis as his form of vigilante justice and lives on the run. Porker is from a world made from literal  _ cartoons.  _

Miles draws, and he skates between the lines of legality and morality. They intersect and they occasionally will not overlap. Right now, right here - him, invisible, scared stiff out of his mind, sticking onto the wall as the girl from earlier leaves her dorm and tromps around the corridor, mechanical arms whirring and buzzing wildly in the silence of the night. 

Okay so he was right. But the Arms bring back unpleasant memories that he would rather prefer to revisit none of, but here they are, because the world doesn’t like him, not even one bit.

He is a vigilante hero. Vanquishing the crimes of Brooklyn and specifically, Brooklyn’s pride, Vision Academy, is part of his job description. Vigilantes don’t ask questions. They swoop in, apprehend the criminal, ditch the criminal like a bag of unwanted potatoes at the law enforcers’ doorstep, and swing into the night sky like they’ve done a good job.

No. That had been tested and done before, and it is a hit or miss effort. He ought to - not do what he has done so far. Rework his strategy. Find something else that works better. 

What does...work better though, is the question. And he doesn’t have a support network to bounce things off by. Which isn’t ideal, but he’ll figure something out!

  
  


_ Dear Spider Fam -  _ his unnumbered letter entry reads -  _ found out that I can’t always punch my way out of things and I actually have to use my brain, and Dio forbid, my words, to reason out of this tangled web of a mess that I’m in. Will update you after my attempt of awkwardly talking things through with a vandalising - vandaliser (?) - graffiti artist wannabe copycat imitator of my style? _

_ Still dumb, _

_ Ya boy _

  
  


Feeling a lot like a creepy and certified illegal stalker, he waits outside the girl’s room, until he’s certain that it is  _ her  _ room where he can knock on the door and have a nonviolent conversations with the occupants inside, without flying spray cans and other nasty surprises. 

Ganke doesn’t ask questions of where he gets up to when they’re not together and it’s big of him to do that, not prying into suspiciously-looking teenage boys and their schemes. But Ganke knows that when Miles wants to tell him something, he will have all the backstory, alternative endings, theatrical performances of the happenings of Miles’ conduct along with an animated apology for keeping him in the dark, so he plays the Angel in the silencing ploy, knowing all will unfold eventually. 

Miles comes into sight, wrangles a hoodie over his head and knocks on the door of room 87. Waits.

The door opens, and a too-familiar octopus mechanical grabby arm emerges along with a lobbed spray can greet him instead of a ‘hello’. He sidesteps easily, because he’s been met with thrown bricks and a pipe before, consecutively, from a juggler. It was nice. This isn’t as bad as that time. Or the time when that bus was thrown at him. Fun times.

As far as things go, he expected all of this. He’s disappointed, but not surprised.

“Hello!” He tells the crack in the wall, where he can see slanted yellow lamp light from within the room. “I’m here to talk to Miss Alvarez?”

The person behind the assailing objects grumbles back at him, clearly there. “Miss Alvarez doesn’t want to talk with you.”

“That’s fair, and honestly I wouldn’t talk with me either, but listen, hey, how about we just trade three sentences of mild civility where we address our shared mess, and then I can promptly leave this corridor as if I didn’t come in?”

The claw hand pauses, whirring, and he takes the chance to grab the metal, touching a fingertip to the parts that look like a circuit, and zaps it to a standstill.

Alvarez snarls at him from beyond the wooden door and wrenches it open, drawing back the Claw Hand. He puts a foot in the threshold and holds his ground, resolutely crossing his arms and frowning disapprovingly at the girl, shaking his head and tutting his tongue, reminiscent of Mother At Her Most Displeased.

“What,” Alvarez sneers at him. “Are you doing inside my room?”

“You didn’t want to cooperate so we have to take away all the Fun Claws and Shiny Pain Cans so us two can have a civilised people conversation,” he stares down the spray cans that she were gathering to her in an obvious attempt to lob him with, and she glares at him but doesn’t try to commit actual assault inside her own dorm room.

It must be all the white walls. They discourage bloody punching sessions and excessively violent vengeance from happening. Imagine having to make everything white and pristine again. Anything new and replaced has to be  _ exactly  _ the same as the old wall. It’s the law. It’s everywhere. The school staff really went out there and came back petty with this beige cream shade from some obscure provider that nowhere else sell in this part of America to deter and also spite the students, who can’t do anything about it because they don’t want to be caught doing crime and getting in trouble, or both. 

Miss Alvarez can presumably be classified into the Both category seeing as how he’s not a new shade on her colour palette titled So Today I Brained A Spider Kid On My Wall. 

“What conversation can we have besides  _ How did you know I room here _ ?” She scowls at him, severe wrinkles on her forehead, almond eyes zeroing in on her. 

“How about we start with,” he’s looking at the mess of spray cans around their feet. “Why do you copy my graffiti art style and vandalise the school?”

Alvarez looks like she was seconds away from snapping  _ Why do you care  _ before her mind plays catch up and she stashes the words away, grunting bullishly as an answer to his perfectly valid question. 

“Listen,” he hedges, on edge. “Vandalise all you want, but don’t do it in my style. I design a lot of stuff for the school. My art is everywhere. You’re kinda making me look like a law-breaking truant where evidences can’t call me out on it and I think I’m just really confused about everything?” 

She then nudges the spray cans out of her way and plops down, gesturing with her chin for him to sit tentatively on her bed, as she removes the Claw Arm Backpack and crosses her legs on her spinny chair, hard eyes facing him.

This feels like an interrogation. He’s not entirely sure on who’s interrogating whom.

“Are we...are we having a conversation or…?” He blinks in succession, and wishes that there are The Forces That Be out there who can guide him, but the Forces have:

  * Retired for the night
  * Retired for the next three business quarters
  * Forever damned him to the Naughty Vigilante Juniors Black List
  * Forsake him because he brought this upon himself 
  * Have possibly existed Once Upon A Time but they currently and unfortunately are No Longer With Him and so that’s his problem now, learn to deal with it without relying on others



“Sorry,” she grunts out, completely unprompted, and leaves it at that.

He blinks some more.

“I - uh, accept your apology?”

She doesn’t make eye contact with him as she huffs into her shoulder.

“It’s not a targeted attack of you or anything. You’re in enough trouble as we speak,” she looks up exactly once (1) at him. “I just didn’t have an outlet to express my anger at - at everything, really, that I guess I began to imitate what others are doing. That way I can resolve my anger and just, I don’t know, get to pretend that I didn’t do the shit I did because it was done in the shadow of people I don’t know.”

He takes quite a while to walk through all of that baggage, because  _ wow.  _ He himself has baggage, but this is another level. An ascension of worsening baggage. Premium backstory and trauma insight, top of the ladder pitching to hell. 

“Um,” is his intelligent response. “Right. Well. I’m not in the moral high ground to call you out on that because me too, I vandalise. But I’ve stopped. Me, serial vandaliser boy, stopped. You too could,” he struggles, because crime committing is in some ways...shapes…and forms - an addiction. He has to treat this like a smoking problem, wean this problem child off the nicotine one less cigarette at a time.

“I too could..?” She lifts her brows, even more unimpressed than she had been before. 

“Slow down on the graffiti and then stop?” He offers on a high note. Literally. His eyes tell her  _ Please don’t hit me,  _ but his voice suggests  _ Hey let’s stop doing crimes together, because we shouldn’t be doing them in the first place anyways, because the consequences will be upon our heads and doing terrible things don’t validate your self-worth, it just makes it worse?  _

She is silent, but she could be glaring at him. He really should have brought Ganke with him - his friend is the pinnacle, the poster boy of Purity and Gentility. Maybe then he wouldn’t have to suffer this oppressive and mildly violent silence with her highness of Aggressive Crime Committing and the Traumatic Doc Ock Octopus Arms.

“Fine,” she crosses her arms.

Okay that was easy.  _ Too  _ easy.

He decides that since he’s going to die anyways, he might as well ask. “So what’s the catch?”

“I’ll stop the graffiti and clean up if -” she looks right into his eyes and through his head - Gwen would have preferred this one to take up the mantle of Spiderman if she knew there were options besides him. “You give me the reassurance that you’ll take me wherever you’re going on those night escapes of yours.”

He’s subtle,  _ okay.  _ He’s great at being Subtle, but this is in regards to women having the sixth sense of smelling out trouble in their general vicinity, and so far it’s been mostly him being called out. It’s not the worst case scenario - he’s not  _ that _ great at sneaking around, so it’s better to be called out than being tossed out.

On the less than fun side though, is he that good at being the local vigilante if he’s not that good at slipping under the radar?

“Morales,” Alvarez’s drawl catches him skidding away from his thoughts. “Breathe. I wasn’t actually serious.”

“No, no, stop, I’m thinking,” he holds up a palm. “I’m having a lot of Big Thoughts right now and honestly this went over much better than I expected, so I’m just reeling in the aftershock -”

Miss Calleros, bless her heart - she’s still here, it’s just that he’d like to remind himself that she did a lot of good by him and she should be getting a nicer student than him in the classroom who regularly is a menace to educational institutions as a whole - said all the guiding words he needs to listen to to go where he needs to go.

“Alvarez,” he begins, and she rolls her eyes, casting away the Doc Ock’s Arms. “Did you make those yourself?”

“Twenty questions is a tasteless and bland game. Yes. What were you going to  _ actually  _ ask?”

Miles is a fifteen-year-old black, Puerto Rican vigilante with arachnid powers. There’s been no other like him. He’s the protagonist of his own world. It’s going to follow in the lines he sketched out.

The Spider Fam, with Peter’s trademarked -  _ All you need is a leap of faith, Miles.  _

He greets danger face on with a smile on his face. He can take this further leap of faith.

“How do you feel about redirecting Brooklyn’s criminal correction regime and methodology?”

  
  


Ganke not only wishes him ‘Bon voyage!’ as he pats down Miles’ hair and shoves a hand down his neck, he also very nicely introduces himself to Alvarez, whose name is Mai and who is nicer to Ganke by virtue of them both being of East Asian heritage than she is with Miles.

He did accost her at her room. That did warrant a few side eyes from here and now.

“Don’t get caught when you come back,” Ganke whispers to him, slipping his glasses away from his face. “Have fun!”

“Haven’t I been having fun recently?” He jokes back, before he slips down alongside the wall down to the ground below.

Ganke had winked at him, the  _ No you haven’t, liar  _ and he thinks of how everything really does suck, but Ganke will never be among that number. 

“Morales!” Mai calls, and he breaks off into a sprint after her.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  
  
  


_ Dear Spider Fam, _

_ I still miss you, but I’m doing okay now. No expectations hold no bars for this Spiderboy. I’m going to do things my own ways and solve my own problems in my own path. Just got over that leap of faith, and I’ll be holding myself to no expectations. _

_ Missing you, but also doing okay without you. _

_ Love, _

_ Your boy _ __

As he ardently investigates, he is aware that what he is doing has the possibility of not working out, like, 9 out of 10 times - and if it does work out, then the number of people he would be helping is not a high number.

“Are you always this much of a pessimist before you start something?” Mai scowls up at him as her fingers fly at an unnatural speed across the keyboard, as they huddle in the darkened disciplinary office of the Brooklyn Police Station. They didn’t break in…. so much as  _ waltzed  _ in - he with the copy of ID card of Captain Davis and a cut version of the master key for most of the doors and rooms in the station. With anything password-encoded, he has on hand a human hacker person, and they can always...give the system a little zap as they force entry their way in.

“Miss Calleros told me that there are No Expectations, all capitalised, mind you,” he murmurs in the dark, as he shines torchlight for physical records of recent arrests made in the prior week. “But I don’t think that was a green light for me to commit trespass, along with breaking and entering, into a police station. Or tamper with their records.”

Mai’s eyebrows might as well be in her hairline now. “Are you the type to just talk himself out of his anxieties before a morally ambiguous task?”

He, obviously in a moral conflict with his sense of feral justice, hesitates. He thought he had already made up his mind prior to the Here and Now, but thinking about the Situation is One Thing, and Actually Being In The Situation is an entirely scope of emotions that he is not intelligent enough to process through, and he is at a stump.

_ Leap of faith, kid,  _ Peter’s voice echoes in his head.  _ You’ve got a spark in you,  _ Father had told him. 

_ Miles -  _ far away and unbidden. Aaron.

Oh, but he is overthinking. He shouldn’t be. 

Mai did say he thinks a lot for someone so guided by his impulses, as she, the termed Amoral Creature, flips open records and stares quizzically at everything displayed to her eyes. 

He talks, sure of it now.

“This isn’t morally ambiguous. It’s morally wrong, like, obviously. Legally too. There’s nothing ambiguous about tampering criminal records - ooh, armed robbery, he can have Sixth Avenue. I heard from Uncle Rory that the drawings over there? A menace to clean. They can have fun with that.”

Mai raises a single slit eyebrow. “Thought you had concerns over the illegality of this entire thing.”

“Well,” he looks down at the tampered record, feeling slightly less stilted than he had been since the Dimensional Split. “It’s a good compromise, I must say.”

“As long as it works, Spiderboy. I don’t care about the mechanics,” Mai shrugs.

(It works. Brooklyn Police starts to notice a change in their archives but pays it no mind. A tiny change, from inside the core of the system, that’s how big events can manifest.

Jefferson does glare at him occasionally at the dinner table though.)

  
  


Miles Morales is a good boy - that is to say, a son who had not yet been on the other side of the law. He is the son of a police officer, a captain of the 78th precinct of the city of Brooklyn, son of the Head Nurse of Brooklyn District Hospital, Miss Calleros’ simultaneous Number One Problem Child and Excellently Performing Student. He can’t think of performing unlawful stunts like defacing public walls and the sides of people’s houses without his dad bringing upon his person the Eye of Lawful Disappointment. Policeman Father can and will lecture him and think of a million and one ways to restrict his freedom. 

However, as  _ Spiderman -  _ erm, sorry, Spiderboy - law enforcement can’t quite graze him the way they could with Miles Morales. With this mask and this suit, he can simultaneously deface public properties to his heart’s content and  _ then  _ rest easy knowing that his colourful artistic expressions will be nicely deposited up by those who had been apprehended by the local police force for minor misdemeanours. 

Not that Miles himself goes around vandalising properties anymore - he spends too much time attempting to outthink Mai Alvarez on philosophical questions on the nature of human rights and helping Ganke with wrangling his hair into a manageable look prior to his best friend entering into college interview boards. 

The lesson is this: If you do wander down the path of vandalism, do clean up after yourself. Or get someone else to clean up after you as a recompensation for the crime against society that they had previously committed. Don’t get caught while you yourself are committing crime yourself, you hypocrite - and remember - 

The Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman Has His Eyes On You and The Police Records. Don’t do crimes. And if you do, don’t get caught. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/hozukitofu) and [cc](https://curiouscat.me/jenny_benny)! i have a writing [twitter](https://twitter.com/jayjem_jam) if anyone is interested in more bs or we can just vibe in the void together


End file.
